Someone commented recently that the “rapture/escape teaching does more to dishearten believers than any ploy the world the flesh or the devil might devise.” Yeah!!! wait…what? “The world, the flesh, and the devil” aren’t as effective as Scriptural teaching in disheartening believers? Because the “rapture/escape teaching” is derived from Scripture, not from philosophy or theology. Oh, that’s right, I forgot; all the promises relating to Christ’s second coming have already been fulfilled by the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, which is why we’ve not had wars since then, and the Church has been triumphant from that day to this, and everyone in the world is a follower of The Way. Oh, that hasn’t happened, either, has it? In fact, things seem to be getting very much worse. So…either the Preterist Jesus is a liar, or he’s too weak to fulfill the promises he made, or he’s not even real. Here’s the hope the Preterist Jesus offers: “Find a happy place in your head, and go there. Because I’m not coming back. Don’t look for me; look to yourselves, and enjoy the kingdom of God that I promised to build after my return to earth. Because, you know, I already came back in A.D. 70 with the Romans when they destroyed Jerusalem. All that nonsense in John’s book of Revelation about half the world’s population dying from war, famine, and disease were fulfilled by the destruction of a single city. The Millenium is now.”

Quite frankly, any doctrinal scheme or theory which depends for its very life on assigning a particular date (or date range) to the composition of a NT book should be dismissed out of hand on that basis alone. [Note: dating related to establishing first century human authorship is quite a different (legitimate) matter than that of dating related to establishing some doctrinal scheme or theory.] In total contrast, recognizing, heeding, taking to heart the Futurism of the book of Revelation, does not depend at all on whether it was composed at some particular pre or post-70AD date; rather, Futurism is based on a genuinely plain, normal, literal interpretation of “the words of the prophecy of this book” (with all due allowance for genuine figures of speech and symbols)—in accord withthe vast connected whole of God’s prophetic truth (2 Pet. 1:20). Preterism, however, depends for its very life, not only on the particular date (pre-70AD) which it conveniently, arbitrarily, and groundlessly assigns to the book of Revelation, but also on its departure from a genuinely plain, normal, literal interpretation of “the words of the prophecy of this book,” a scheme which is inherently forced to mysticalize/alchemize the God-breathed book itself—in isolation fromthe vast connected whole of God’s prophetic truth.

I prefer to keep my eyes on Christ, and on His return, which is what Scriptures say we should do.